How Sister Nicole takes stock

THERE is one adviser that Sister Nicole Rielle has that other stock market players do not have. He is called God and, so far, has shown himself to be on the side of piety and Mammon at the same time.

Sister Nicole, 73, is the Catholic Church's answer to a Wall Street guru: a self-made nun who is moving from her native France to Rome to spread the gospel of ethical investments.

For two decades, she has been famous in France for advising other religious orders on their investments. Specifically, she recommends shifting money out of property and mutual funds and into stocks and shares that conform to humanist values. Eighty religious orders in France listen to her. Her two funds, created by a Paris bank, avoid investing in alcohol producers, arms dealers and tobacco farmers.

'Of course, it is impossible to be an absolute purist,' says Sister Nicole of the Roman Catholic Order of Notre Dame. 'We cannot say categorically that we exclude all weapons. Can any outsider know who makes all the wires, microchips, batteries and the other bits and pieces that end up in a tank or a missile?' But her divinely guided stock market plays have brought such good returns for French religious orders that she is now invited routinely to international banking conferences.

Chief executives she meets can expect a grilling on child labour, pollution, pensions and other welfare issues. She says: 'We can influence how companies behave by having a dialogue.' Now she is setting up shop in Rome to aid many Italian religious groups that are struggling to make ends meet in the face of dwindling returns and poor growth forecasts.

A teacher in the 1970s, she became a financial analyst after she was asked to begin overseeing the accounts of 17 schools in the religious order she was in. She advocated selling property to invest in stocks - a major move in a country where, two decades ago, the markets were viewed with suspicion and fear, especially by religious orders.

Marc Favard of Meeschaert Bank, which manages her two funds, Nouvelle Strategie and Action Ethnique, said: 'The funds have a total market value of about $70m (£44.6m). They earn on average 8% a year. We did this from scratch because there was no such thing as an ethical fund in France at the time she started.'